What do you remember about them? I have never been to one, have no idea what it's like.

I remember the summer my aunt died. I was eight. The day of her funeral, we went back to my grandparents' farm, and I wandered around by myself outside all afternoon, looking in the windows now and then at all the strangers. In the back bedroom, the one that looked out over the pasture, I saw my uncle. He was in his thirties, a very tall man, maybe 6'3", and he was sitting in my great-grandmother's lap, sobbing. She was a tiny old woman, patting his back, and his long legs were dragging on the floor. I didn't look at grownups the same way, after that.

I remember riding horses bareback and feeling free.

San Gregorio
 

I've been planning a trip home to California. I grew up in the SF Bay area and haven't been back in almost three years. I can't wait to walk my favorite beach at San Gregorio--so many important things happened to me there...

I first learned how to free myself from a rip current there--and almost drowned too.

I realized I was gay on this beach (one beautiful, classic California sunny summer day) with my two best (str8) friends....who are still close to me 31 years later.

I also got my first Butch Cock Blow Job on this beach, one warm summer night...laying against the bank of the small creek which cuts thru the beach and empties into the ocean.

I asked a girl to wait for me while walking this beach...as my Army unit was being mobilized for war in the Middle East. (She did.) I made an important decision while sitting on this beach by myself, after I returned.

I'm going back to make another important decision too.

Tonight, I'm remembering San Gregorio State Beach...and missing my other home.

I remember sitting with my dad while he played Beatles songs on his acoustic guitar and sang all the wrong words in his thick accent but sang them with so much heart and soul. I also remember thinking that these were the only moments he was not angry and we got along over the mutual love of music. As time passed, I stopped listening and he would play and I would sing. All was well with the world...even if it was for a short while. I really do love music. I am grateful it gave us those moments...

Pretty certain I will be sharing lots of memories in here over time.

I remember....
Going to the bathroom at my sitter's house and falling in the toilet. I sang Yummy Yummy I Got Love in My Tummy till I was rescued. I was 4.

At another sitter's I remember always eating spagettios and peanut butter sandwhiches for lunch. I'm sure there was other food but I distictly remember this being all I ever ate there. I was 4.

I remember walking home from the public pool in Tempe AZ when I was 5 and losing my shoes somehow. My older siblings took turns throwing down their towels so I could keep from walking on the pavement till I would make it to patches of grass.

I spent 7 weeks of the summer of 2004 in England. Most of that time was in Oxford, but we visited many places. The graves of dead writers. Shakespeare plays. Museums. Stonehenge. Famous and infamous gardens. Tasting the mineral water in Bath. Lots of pubs. My first Lesbian bar! A gorgeous and delightfully lonely trip by bus and train to Port Isaac on the coast of cornwall, where I stayed in a surf shack and read by candlelight and swam in the cold ocean between cliffs. I never got to Tintagel, but I saw it from a distance which might have been better.

Although I enjoyed it very much, nothing really touched me. Nothing really hit me until we visited the Haworth parsonage. At first being there was like every other place I'd been to - something worth appreciating, something to try to hold onto for later savoring. But then I walked into Charlotte's room. The moment I walked into her room, tears just jumped into my eyes. I didn't cry like a baby or anything, but it was a surprise. Of all the many places I'd been to and through, walking into Charlotte Bronte's little bedroom is the thing that moved me most of all.

I remember...

Being in the Brownies and bridging over to Girl Scouts. I still have my sash and pins.
I remember our girl scout sleepover in the backyard of one of the girls. It was the best sleepover/camp-out I had ever experienced as a kid. Notice I said, as a kid... lol.
I remember playing four-square and kickball at school. They were the only schoolyard games I enjoyed with the whole class.
I remember being a hall monitor in the fourth grade. It looked like this except it was purple and white and didn't have a helicopter spinny thing on it... Nor the mouse lol. I still have it...
http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/9...escau153c6.jpg

I remember laying in bed at night and hearing the trains singing down the tracks a mile or so from my home. When I was little, they meant home to me, and when I slept away from home where I couldn't hear them, I'd wake up in the night from not hearing them.

Then when I was getting older and knew I was "odd" the train whistle meant freedom. Odd was our particular small townism for gay. I couldn't just be "One of them" which meant "not Methodist or Episcopalian. I had to be "One of them" and "odd". Later I realized I was queer, which was different from "odd". I wasn't even good at not being right! Even my "wrong" was wrong! So I read a lot, losing myself in books because I so didn't fit as an odd, biracial, religious minority. Books about trains meant a lot to me, especially people who went on one-way trips. Some day I would get on a train and go somewhere else. Somewhere safer than home, which is crazy because your home is supposed to be safe. In the Last Battle, the reason the remaining Friends of Narnia get sent over is because they were on a train and it wrecked and they died, which is why they got to stay. When we realized they were dead, my sister cried sadly because they were all dead and I cried happily because they never had to go back and they got there on a train.

I didn't leave on a train, I left in a car and when I got to my new town, I looked for an apartment. I ended up in a dodgy trailer park even though I could have afforded a better spot because it was close to the train. It was literally on "the other side of the tracks". It was crazy for a single, 18 year old, small town girl to live alone in a place like that. I made one or two close friends during that time, including an older Butch with issues who was my first lover. I still love her. But she wasn't my GF, she was a friends with benefits kind of woman, because she couldn't trust enough to have a girlfriend at that time. But she was a friend, of sorts, and she rocked my world. I look back now and realize that in a more open world, an easier world, she would have been Leather to the core, doing the D/s thing. We had an unhealthy friendship, but it was good, for what it was. We managed not to hurt each other. Her loneliness overcame her and she drank too much in the end. She died in an old churchyard, a stone's throw from the tracks. Every time I hear Arlo Guthrie's Last Train to Glory I think of her and smile. And sometimes I cry.

Now we live in yet another city, smaller than the last one, but close enough to the big city to run in for the day when we need to. We take the commuter train. I love it. We can drive in, and sometimes we do, but usually, I take the train. I live about a quarter mile from the station so it's an easy walk. The last train runs by at 930, and then I can go to bed. Even if I'm super tired and go to bed early, I can't sleep 'til I hear that last train... As soon as it's gone, so am I.

Comfort and freedom, and death and safety.

That's what I remember about trains.

This made me think of my own magical Brownie / Girl Scouts memory. I wanted to join a Brownie troop (if that's the right word) with girls from my school in my Ohio suburb, and it was run by one of the girl's fathers, which I guess is perhaps a little odd in itself (dunno). Anyway my parents were told that there really were enough Brownies and that if I wanted to be admitted I would have to be voted in. My parents both thought, "The nerve!" I was really bummed about it and explained to them that because there were quite a number of popular kids in that troop, and I was not popular, my chances were very low of being voted in. However, my dad was furious about the whole idea that I had to be voted in and began scheming right away. He asked me who the most popular girls in the troop were, and when I told him, he asked me to invite them to go to [insert a variety of pricey local places in Ohio that children love] which he would be picking up the tab for and chauffeuring us around to, while remaining in the background so that I could campaign like a cool kid. We lived in a lower middle class suburb, and I didn't get taken to special places like this (nor did the other girls), so it was doubly exciting to be spending time with girls who usually ignored me and also be doing activities my parents never agreed to pay for for me. Flash to: I was voted into the Brownie troop to the distaste of the elitist dad that had been so unwelcoming to me. Ha!

I remember the smell of noxema on hot summer nights. My grandmother used it on us when we got sunburned. Do they even make that stuff anymore.

I remember the intoxicating smell of plastic on Christmas morning, from all those toys, and the year I got my first guitar. I was 12. I stayed in my room playing and singing for hours at a time. Before that, I had ukuleles. I had one shaped like an electric guitar! I loved all of them.

a sudden randomly sparked memory... two actually.
My favorite beach trips...
December 5th, 1998 beautiful spring-like weather as I walked on the beach for my very first time; in total, delightful solitude while everyone else was at the company Christmas party...a nice long walk just me, the birds, the slight wind, peaceful beauty and the sound of surf crashing...

many years later, on a sunny Valentine's weekend trip to Myrtle beach for my first time...the whole trip filled with wonderful, fun, delightful memories and laughter, contentment. My morning spent sitting on the dunes waiting on the sunrise, the cold sand, the crisp air, breathtaking colors of the sun, delighting in the textures around me like the dune grass and shells... being in total peacefulness, how calming the crashing surf, the slight wind feeling like it was cleansing my soul. The comforting sense of knowing a friend was watching me from the balcony, allowing me to have my moment but looking out for me. How cool the February weather was (and how the sand froze my butt cheeks), but how warm I felt inside. My inner 'little kid' joy and delight while visiting the Aquarium. God, I want to go back!!! Especially to those peaceful, inner-warmth times.

I remember riding my bike to the beach, the summer before sixth grade, and parking it by a tree. Then I would climb the tree, sit up there and eat an apple I had brought with me. I loved apples, and looking out over the beach.

I remember getting a stomach ache before dinner, all the time. Oddly, this isn't a bad memory. I would curl up on the upstairs couch, while my mom made dinner. I could hear her in there, and smell the food. By the time she called us to the table, my stomach ache was usually gone. She was a great cook, especially before she lost her Texan ways and stopped frying so much.

I have a stomach ache right now, I think my stomach is feeling nostalgic.

Roy
 

All this talk and activity around guns reminded me of my cap pistols, spinning my six shooters into my holsters. I must have been about 7.

I recall my favorite "cowboy" jeans with R. R. on the front pockets in red rhinestones and that brown and white furry calico vest, and a checkered shirt with a string tie. I loved my little blonde neighbor that wore those pretty skirts and twirled all the time.

My Mom kept those clothes for me when I outgrew them, knowing how much I loved being that little dude. She knew I loved that little blonde, and many others when I got all growed up , and put away my six shooters.

Uniquestwfemme's post triggered a memory for me: Driver's Ed.

Some guy, the driver's ed teacher, would load four of us in a little beater car and his first stop was always 7-11, where he'd get a large coffee—which he would invariably spill all over himself.

I contributed to this phenomenon with my bad habit of braking, the instant I panicked behind the wheel. I did this the first time he had me go onto the freeway. I remember him screaming, "Go! Go! Go!" because I had braked, having gotten spooked the moment I was going from the on ramp to the first lane. Coffee was steaming off his shirt, and the girls in the backseat were cracking up.

I remember waking to the sound of the waves.. They were so loud I just couldn't believe it. I remember opening the curtians and looking outside at the sunrise and the ocean. No one was walking on the beach and it was so peaceful and beautiful. I remember grabbing some shorts and a top and running down the four flights of stairs and running to the water. I remember how cold it was on my feet but it also made me feel alive again. Ready to take on whatever was to come my way. Although I had to leave this place and would not return for at least a year I remember feeling renewed. My strength had returned and the feeling that I can handle any situation that came my way.